Biography: Mark Chavez

I'm an artist from the American Southwest, eg. El Paso TX, Yuma AZ, currently living in LA. I'm Chicano though I like to use the term Nican Tlaca in that I'm mostly of Mexican native origin. Since 2005 I’ve been based in Singapore. There, I set up an animation program in an new art school at a big tech research university, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Though I'm no longer a professor at the university, I have ongoing research there. I'm currently splitting my time between Singapore and Los Angeles.

I've worked at various studios in LA including Dreamworks Feature Animation and Rhythm and Hues Studios back when it was at Playa Vista; in projection media at a company called Lasermedia Inc (where I projected my MFA thesis animation called Omeyotl on the side of the federal building in Westwood during the 1984 Olympics); early game development at Philips Interactive; as a lead motion graphics artist for TV in Japan at Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) Vision, as a lead artist in feature animated films and big budget visual effects feature films.

I'm currently working on a public art installation called Media Art Nexus NTU, Singapore. It’s a large 15 x 2 meter LED wall with motion sensors and depth cameras. I use Derivative Touch Designer to program and animate mostly non-objective abstract designs. These are audio reactive works. I am working with academics from the School of Art, Design and Media, the School of Computer Science and Engineering at NTU and academic teams in the Psychology area of the School of Social Sciences at NTU on one facet of this project.